Yasmina Reza’s 2006 play, God of Carnage, has
been performed to critical and popular acclaim around the world, and is now
produced by independent company Twisted Tree Theatre at
the Tap
Gallery’s Downstairs theatre.
The story of two
families who arrange a meeting to discuss the appropriate action required after
one child attacked the other with a stick in the park, God of Carnage – appropriately – descends into a chaotic and
increasingly childish evening of name-calling, taunts, accusations, drinking
and vomit. Described
recently in The Age as being “like
a simpler incarnation of Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap, [the] chief
joy of the play is the way it slides into an Edward Albee-style marital
free-for-all, as the adults begin to act worse than the children who brought
them together.” Like Albee’s Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? and Tsiolkas’ The
Slap, there is something positively delicious and bordering on
schadenfraude about watching two couples tear each other to pieces as they try
to come to an agreement.
